Resurrection???

I heard a ‘Resurrection Story’ this week …

A computer had refused to turn on and so it was taken to the computer doctor. After a number of days the message was received that the computer had died and please come and pick up the ‘body’ for burial. However once it was safely home again, the owner decided that the computer could be resurrected with the help of running the ‘restore’ disc and some loving care. Now I would like to be able to say this story had a happy ending, but alas the next day found the owner in a store buying a new hard drive to replace the one that had died! So why do I call this a Resurrection Story? Because even with the new hard drive installed and the old one gone, those things that had been learned with the old will continue to be part of the new.

The core of the ‘Resurrection story’ we will hear read from the Gospel and likely at least to be referenced in the sermon preached from the pulpit on Easter Sunday talks of the bodily resurrection after 3 days of a man who had been crucified by the Roman Empire for being [for want of a better term] a shit-disturber. Many people to this day believe literally what the Gospel writers were saying.

No, I don’t believe in the bodily resurrection, nor have I believed in it for most of my adult life. It was a 'good story' that I was prepared to accepted silently for the vocal majority.

Yes, I do believe in the resurrection of Jesus: not a physical resurrection, but just the same a resurrection. After his death his followers were so inspired by what Jesus had told them, that instead of forgetting what he had taught, they began to live their lives by those precepts, similar to the new hard drive in the story above.

Once you pass from a childlike belief in the magical to a more mature faith, you see the story in a different way that is just as true. As Marcus Bog wrote in Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, “Postcritical naviete is the ability to hear the biblical stories once again as true stories, even as one knows that they may not be factually true and that their truth does not depend upon their factuality.”

Like the computer in the story I started with, like you and like me, Jesus, too, was resurrected.

“We Christians say glibly that we are "saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus" but seem to understand this as some kind of heavenly transaction on his part, instead of an earthly transformation … We need to deeply trust and allow both our own dyings and our own certain resurrections, just as Jesus did! This is the full pattern of transformation.” Richard Rohr: Adapted from his blog ‘Accepting the Mystery of Suffering’ Monday, March 9, 2015.

What is your resurrection story?

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